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©MONU
11-03-10
//
NEW ISSUE MONU #12 - REAL URBANISM
(browse
the entire issue #12 on YouTube)
Luxury Space By Jason Lee; The World
According to Mr. Reds By Doreen Jakob; The Shelter Category
By Mammoth (Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes); How the City of Broad
Shoulders Bought its Growth Spurt By Karl Johann Hakken; Residential
Developers and Investors in Central Europe: Boom and Bust By Maximilian
Mendel; Pyongyang in a New Era By Yim Dongwoo; Casino City
State By Rustam Mehta and Thomas Moran; Solidere, Inc., or Downtown
Beirut By Carol Moukheiber; Real High - The Desire for the Real
in Urban Real Estate By McLain Clutter; Real Creativity: A Case
for Ethical Freedom in Architecture By Randall Teal; Life without
Architects - Interview with Magriet Smit By Bernd Upmeyer; The
New York Value Exchange By Joyce Hwang; Real Big - Interview with
Bjarke Ingels By Beatriz Ramo; Magic Realism - A New Skyline for
Rome By Simone De Iacobis; Business Park De Hoef Revisited 1998-2008
By Arjan Harbers (Topotronic); Brand New Landlords By Daan
Roggeveen and Michiel Hulshof; Living on the Edge By Bas Princen;
Why should a Developer read Aristotle By Marta Relats; Unbuilt
Rotterdam By ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles]; Rotterdam is a Whore
- Interview with Andre Kempe By Beatriz Ramo and Bernd Upmeyer; To
Build or not to Build By MVRDV
Just
like the "Ideal Woman" on the cover of this issue on
Real Urbanism - a sculpture by the Brooklyn based artist Tony Matelli
- most of our cities are shaped by a particular set of values that does not
necessarily lead to high quality urban spaces, but instead to scary, ethically
unacceptable and distorted forms. As the "Ideal Woman", so "Ideal
Cities" can easily end up only fulfilling the wishes and dreams
of a powerful minority, but neglect the needs of most of the other people. Jason
Lee, one of the contributors to this issue, that deals more with "Real
Estate" Urbanism rather than with Actual or Factual Urbanism, uses
this sculpture in his article "Luxury Space" to display
the consequences that can occur when a financially powerful elite develops real
estate projects in the city of Shanghai merely to accommodate their consumerist
desires. Cities have been reduced to machines for making and spending money
as Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes put it in their
piece "The Shelter Category". Especially in Central
European countries, where two decades ago the state-controlled economy changed
into a market-economy, developers are driven by pure profit rather than by a
genuine desire or even awareness of sustainable neighbourhoods and city development
as Maximilian Mendel describes in his text "Residential
Developers and Investors in Central Europe: Boom and Bust". But
blaming only the financial elites and the real estate industry for the prevailing
urbanism of mediocrity would be too easy. For successful urban planning, cities
depend on private financing as Carol Moukheiber points out in
her contribution "Solidere, Inc., or Downtown Beirut",
where a productive collaboration between a corporate and a cooperative party
led - although heavily criticised and carried out in a kind of pseudo democratic
Berlusconian way - to prosperous results. In the case of Rotterdam, where the
municipality actually cares very little about the city, real estate developers
seem to be even more concerned about the quality of urban spaces than the city
itself, as stated by Andre Kempe in an interview with us entitled
"Rotterdam is a Whore". To halt the process by which
the built-up form of our cities continues to be mainly driven by practical concerns
such as efficiency, profit, and self-promotion, Randall Teal proposes
in his piece "Real Creativity: A Case for Ethical Freedom in Architecture"
that architects should become developers themselves. But how many architects
would be able and interested in doing that? Magriet Smit, a Rotterdam
based real estate developer, explains in the interview "Life without
Architects" that she actually tries more and more to avoid working
with planners and rather collaborates directly with construction companies as
they share a greater understanding of their profession. But to prevent our cities
from turning into monstrous "Ideal Cities", as perverted as the "Ideal
Woman", all the parties involved that are shaping the cities - the developers,
the municipalities and the planners - have to accept their interdependencies,
and have to try to understand the different interests of each party and have
to dare to navigate into unknown territory as Bjarke Ingels concludes
in an interview with us entitled "Real Big".
(Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, February 2010)
25-08-09
// MONU #11 - CLEAN URBANISM

(browse
the entire issue #11 on YouTube)
Sci-fi Greenery ...or just Responsibility? By Samo Pedersen; Clean Cities - Dirty People By Matteo Muggianu; Dirty Consumerism By Nikonus Pappas; Coming Clean By Randall Teal ; Domes over Manhattan - Interview with Gerd Hauser By Bernd Upmeyer; Rendering the Clean By Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI); The Mobile Library Unit By John Southern; Where the Grass Is Greener By TomorrowsThoughtsToday; Clean around the Edges By Lee Altman; Bio - Port By Greg Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski; Zeekracht - The North Sea Masterplan By OMA; Scarcity: Bipolar Urbanism in the Sonoran Desert By Felipe Correa; Regenerative Ecologies By Claudio Astudillo Barra; Clean Energy is Dirty Business By Aleksander Tokarz; Dystopic Verdure By Jacob Ross Boswell; How to Win Poetic Praise and Influence Architects By Amanda Webb; The Cooperative City By Rogier van den Berg; Mania By Bryan Norwood and the Jackson Community Design Center
Do we simply
have to stop having sex to produce Clean Urbanism - i.e. an urbanism that is
dedicated to minimizing both the required inputs of energy, water, and food
for a city as well as its waste output of heat, air pollution as CO2, methan,
and water pollution, Samo Pedersen asks in his piece Sci-fi
greenery..or just Responsibility?. In fact Randall Teal
sees the growing world population frequently ignored in discussions on sustainability,
as he points out in his article Coming Clean: Owning Up to the Real
Demands of a Sustainable Existence. Fewer people spend less energy,
and as the gas and oil supply will come to an end sooner or later, saving energy
may be a cheaper and smarter solution for cities than depending on renewable
energies, as Gerd Hauser, one of the leading researcers on the
implementation of the EU Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings, explains
in an interview with us, entitled Domes over Manhatten.
Although sustainability has recently become a cache misère for our lack
of intent, a trendy make-up hiding our incompetence, with Clean Urbanism being
its apotheosis as Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI)
maintain in their contribution Rendering the Clean,
energy self-sufficient cities are technically possible as Gerd Hauser states
and explains using a five-point manifesto. Greg Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski
support that view by introducing their Bio-Port project,
a vision of a Free Energy City set in Liverpool, where
the old dockyards have been transformed into bio-productive algae farms. Furthermore,
the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) illustrates in its
project Zeekracht The North Sea Masterplan
how wind farms could be clustered along an Energy Super-Ring in the North Sea,
distributing national surpluses and supplying regional energy needs efficiently
and profitably. On the other hand, Clean Urbanism cannot only be understood
from a purely technocratic perspective, but also needs a social one as Claudio
Astudillo Barra articulates in his article Regenerative
Ecologies A Prototypical Approach to the Territory, introducing
Felix Guattaris ideas of ecosophy. On such social aspects Rogier
van den Berg focuses in his piece on The Cooperative City,
where a community is created that triggers individual initiative and the cooperation
of its users to generate collective values. The Cooperative City requires a
flexible plan with an open end that is only guided by one set of rules, described
by Bryan Norwood and the Jackson Community Center
as Mania: An Emergent Sustainability of Density and Intensity,
created by the disorganized, hyperactivity of an actualized system with no specified,
singular goal, a bottom-up phenomenon that emerges from the individual events
of architecture within the city, combined with the ideology of urbanism conceived
as anti-capitalism and anti-homogenization. It is mania, and mania is clean.
06-02-09 // MONU #10 - HOLY URBANISM

(browse
the entire issue #10 on YouTube)
A Mormon Megaproject by Daniel Hadley; Then It Hit Me: Learn
to Meditate by Brian A Shabaglian; The Sacred and the Holy: Transient
Urban Spaces by Colin Davies; Cross Utilization: Enhanced Religious
Experiences by NL Architects; Strata and Sound: The Adhan as an
Urban Operating Procedure by Peter Dorsey; The Sensory Experience
of Sacred Space: Senso-Ji and Meiji-Jungu, Tokyo by Raymond Lucas;
Peace Through Superior Horsepower by Speedism; God is a Nigerian
by Emeka Udemba; Emblematic Power - Interview with Kees Christiaanse;
Sacred Wire by Elliott Malkin; The Mormon Churchs
Infrastructure of Salvation by Jesse LeCavalier; Do not give up
Hope! by Maurizio Scarciglia; [uhn-hoh-lee] Alliance: A Domain
of Objects by Edward Richardson; Drive-Through Religion by
Carolyn Sponza; Urban Rituals by Abha Mahajan; Sacred Beauties
by Karen Crequer; Strucked by a Freak Wave by Matilde Cassani
Can the view on cities get any bigger than through religion? Probably not.
But we believe that a magazine on urbanism such as MONU, that appears only twice
a year, can never have a too open perspective. Although the picture in this
issue is big, and the contributions are diverse and have different focuses,
one thing can be found that runs through almost this entire issue on Holy Urbanism.
It is the convinction that Holy Urbanism in the contemporary city does not appear,
and is not created any longer, merely by religion itself, but rather by a crossbreed
of religion and economy. How such Holy Urbanism can be produced is explained
by Daniel Hadley, for example, through the City Creek Center in
Salt Lake City that quite clearly defies the dichotomy between market and temple
cities, in his article A Mormon Megaproject. Thus,
the City Creek Center is designed to be a centre of consumerism and economic
production, whose purpose, nevertheless, is to ensure vitality in front of the
nearby Temple Square. Sacred and commercial spaces seem increasingly to coalesce
and create a kind of Foucaultian Heterotopia, an environment that is capable
of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces and several sites that
are in themselves incompatible, as Colin Davies points out in
his contribution The Sacred and the Holy: Transient Urban Spaces.
Peter Dorsey in his piece Strata and Sound: The Adhan
as an Urban Operating Procedure argues that contemporary Holy
Urbanism is flourishing especially at places where religion is creating a hybrid
together with capitalism. As an example he mentions the Lakewood Church Central
Campus in Houston, Texas that can seat more than 16.000 worshipers, adapting
efficiently into a spectacle-based environment by satisfying multiple consumer
appetites simultaneously. In the Nigerian city of Lagos the hybridisation processes
of religion and the market have even transformed the urban space itself into
a battlefield, in a free market where religion is a commodity to sell and an
urban survival strategy, as Emeka Udemba concludes in his God
is a Nigerian. Within such a capitalistic realm, religious buildings
follow an increasingly territorial logic that is similar to capitalistic corporations
or franchises such as McDonalds or Starbucks. The Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-Day Saints, for example, standardized the design of their temples
and thus created a generic network of identical buildings that are spread out
- Starbucks-like - all over the planet, as Jesse LeCavalier illustrates
in his article The Mormon Churchs Infrastructure of Salvation.
Carolyn Sponza, in her contribution Drive-Through-Religion,
even states that in the United States, planning a church and a shopping mall
always begins with the same capitalistic question how much parking the
site can accommodate. Such an attitude leads in a lot of cases to the design
of big box, Ikea-like, building types that are perfectly located along a suburban
highway. But religious big boxes nevertheless - though convenient and visible
- force visitors to seek them out, park their cars, and walk toward their front
doors. And if you dont think its for you, you can keep driving along
the highway until the next big box containing another religion grabs your attention.
Such Holy Urbanism promotes religious choice and makes multi-religious spaces
possible that are flexible as pieces of fashion, as empty spaces for inter-religious
dialogue that incarnate the belief in a multi-faith society and allow for openness,
and heterogeneity as Karen Crequer reveals in her piece Sacred
Beauties.
26-08-08 // MONU #9 - EXOTIC URBANISM

(browse the entire issue #9 on YouTube)
A City under the Influence by Vesta Nele Zareh; Cities of Girl
by Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix/ Map Office; Thawing
Urbanisms in the Arctic by Mason White and Lola Sheppard; Living
Facades - Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting by Owen
Hatherley; Flying Grass Carpet by Joop de Boer; The 'Great
Comeback' of The Chinese to Katendrecht by Els Vervloesem; Urbanism
of the permanent Tourist by Deane Simpson; Plastic Wrapped History
by Hannah Epstein; Golf Courses and Cultural Conventions of Nature
by Jacqueline Schlossman; The Sky is not near enough by Shumon
Basar; Defining the Exotic when Identity is Lost by Yasmine El
Rashidi; Nondescript Exotism inside the Urban Tissue by Anne Seghers;
Pseudo-Democracies and Pseudo-Commissions - Interview with Reinier
de Graaf/ OMA by Bernd Upmeyer and Beatriz Ramo; Elite Commune
by Lei Liu; Re-fun by Yaowalak Baltisberger; Urbanism
in a Minor Key by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza; The Exotic and
the Local - From Superhero to Supercity by Yehuda
In this issue we have taken the deliberate risk of making ourselves look
ridiculous by focusing its theme on "the exotic", which is often seen
as some sort of worn out, utterly out of date topic, immediately evoking images
of colonialism and imperialism. But what fascinated us right from the beginning,
since this topic idea of exotic urbanism popped up in our minds, is - without
any irony - the opportunity to shift the perception towards global urban phenomena,
into a direction that does not necessarily focus on the question how cities
more and more become the same through their global battle and competition to
attract more urban assets, but how they can actually become more different despite
an ever - expanding exchange and an increasingly accelerating process of interaction.
On that question this issue of MONU provides a magnificent collection of exuberant
essays and projects. There is something very paradoxical about the exotic in
an urban context. When a city like Tehran, for example, started importing western
planning models around 200 years ago, it tried to distinguish itself from conventional
structures but also from other cities, as Vesta Nele Zareh has
illustrated in her article "A City under the Influence".
This could also be interpreted as an excursion into a brashly beautiful but
savage and unforgiving territory as Owen Hatherley puts it in
his piece about "Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting".
Such exotic urban elements also seemed to deliver the possibility to escape
from everyday surroundings and to experience the feeling of entering another
world without leaving your actual urban realm as Deane Simpson
describes it in his text on the "Urbanism of the permanent Tourist".
But as soon as a certain critical mass of exotic urban elements has been implemented
in a city and a certain amount of time has passed, exotic elements can no longer
be distinguished from other elements, and especially not from the local elements.
Shumon Basar describes such a phenomenon in his contribution "The
Sky is not near enough" as a certain surreal salvation, where everything
slides into some sort of grey state between both poles, a kind of pseudo-local
or pseudo-exotic condition, something utterly unmemorable. Reinier de
Graaf, one of the partners of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture,
clarifies this neither-white-nor-black-condition in the whole current political
situation on the Eurasian continent in an interview with us entitled "Pseudo-Democracies
and Pseudo-Commissions". The conditions of the cities of the 21st
century can probably best be described with the term "pseudo" as a
result of the end of a black and white thinking, which gives the stage to dualistic
urban qualities. Cities become able, just as superheroes, to oscillate between
two different entities, one earthly and mundane, the other heroic and exotic
as part of their super-schedule as Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat investigates
in his piece on "The Exotic and the Local - From the Superhero to
the Supercity".
14-03-08 // MONU #8 - BORDER URBANISM

(browse the entire issue #8 on YouTube)
SlaveCity
- Interview with Joep van Lieshout by Bernd Upmeyer; Potential
Nation States by STAR; Global Islands in North Korea by
Simone Cartier and Katrin Gimmel; Operation Desert by Peter Mörtenböck
and Helge Mooshammer; Kaliningrad by Ines Lüder, Dominique
Hurth and Ciarán Walsh; Segregated Istanbul by Pelin Tan;
Crisscrossing Lives by Horng-Chang Hsieh and Vittaya Ruangrit;
A Fictional Dialogue between two Curators by Umi; Cross
- Border Suburbias by Teddy Cruz; Reciprocal Developments
by Arjan Harbers and Kristin Jensen; Tijuana - Vernacular by
Federico Diaz de Leon Orraca; Border Models by Annemarie Strihan;
Bohemian Cheapness - Interview with Jaroslav Kubera by Bernd Upmeyer;
Sin City by Daan Roggeveen; On a Trip Down Memory Lane by
Lukas Feireiss; Windsor: The American Sector by Justin A. Langlois;
Westberlin - My Cold War Heroine by Vesta Nele Zareh
Although
we never intended to be a utopian magazine, when we started out we were put
into the same category as those small and short-lived radical periodicals of
the 60s and 70s. As a matter of fact we were never interested in
contemplating the fictional, yet perfect, socio-political urban conditions or
the possibility of the ideal society, however unrealistic. To the contrary,
we have always been fascinated by all the idiosyncrasies of reality, the conventional
and the pragmatic as an inexhaustible source of innovation. Nevertheless, in
this issue we provide some reflections on utopia. It appears to be the case
that cities located close to nation-state borders in particular, may be described
as isolated islands, where a different type of life seems possible, and as places
conducive to experiments and utopia as Ines Lüder, Dominique Hurth,
and Ciarán Walsh show in their article about the Russian enclave
Kalingrad. Border cities are often privileged as they are in a
position to determine their own rules. Joep van Lieshout created
with his highly sinister utopian art project SlaveCity
such an extreme case of self-rule, which he explains in an interview with us.
Switching back to reality, it may be said that nation-state borders seem to
have the most vigorous impact on cities when they appear in doubles
i.e. one on each side of the border. Together they create a kind of symbiotic
urban love and hate relationship, a living together of dissimilar organizations,
which can lead to positive and negative Reciprocal Developments
between both cities as explored by Arjan Harbers and Kristin Jensen
in their case studies on Ceuta and Gibraltar. Teddy Cruz - in
his article Cross-Border Suburbias describes
such relations between border cities as exposed landscapes of contradiction
where conditions of difference and sameness collide and overlap. But the clash
of different cultures and ideologies in two border cities of two different countries,
which are located close to each other, can also evoke severe identity conflicts
as is pointed out by Justin A. Langlois when he describes the
suffering of the Canadian city Windsor under the influence of
Americanization through its neighbor Detroit. The increase in such identity
conflicts between border cities can even transform cities into urban ideological
battlefields, where urban planning is utilized to gain political and cultural
supremacy, as it is shown by Vesta Nele Zareh in her piece about
the Architectural Cold War between West- and East Berlin.
10-09-07 // MONU #7 - 2ND RATE URBANISM

(browse
the entire issue #7 on YouTube)
Branding
the Generic City by Alfredo Andia; Bern, Beverwijk, and the Representation
of Cities by Joost Meuwissen; Claiming Space by Daan and
Job Roggeveen; I like my Town by Medium; Music City, USA
by Veronica Kavass; Banal Urbanism by Jamie Peck; 2nd
Rate Urbanism in 1st Rate Urban Areas? by Doreen Jakob; I ROTterdam
by Charles Bessard and Nanne de Ru; The Re-Creation of the European
City by Beatriz Ramo/ STAR; Dumped in Almere - Interview
with Floris Alkemade by Bernd Upmeyer and Beatriz Ramo; Little New
York by Melisa Vargas; Wholesale Urbanism by Michael Jenson;
3rd Rate Guide to Second Rate Urbanism by Alex Schafran; What
is Antiurbanism? by Michael J. Thompson; Bonifacio Global City.
Ideal Manila. by Ursula Faix/ bad architects group
In an increasingly
connected world the economic realities are precarious for most 2nd rate cities.
In the competition for jobs and an ever expanding tax base, 2nd rate cities
are in a squeeze between the suburbs where land is even cheaper and even more
accessible by car on the one side, and the real attractive 1st rate urban areas
that draw the highly educated and the creative on the other side. And since
planning down to a suburb is not an option that is considered by
most cities, the fight for the survival of 2nd rate cities is to attract more
urban assets. Beatriz Ramo presents one such Urban Shopping
List for European second-rate cities. According to the US-based urbanist
Richard Florida the latest must have for a city is a creative class.
In the information economy attracting those who work in the creative sectors
is the key to economic success and growth. However as Jamie Peck
in his article Banal Urbanism Cities and the Creativity Fix
argues, this strategy is just another way in which cities compete for an inherently
mobile resource the creatives can at any time pack up and move to the
next happening place. Plus the causal story is far from solid, the cities investing
in their hip factor as a development strategy might well be chasing a chimera.
But in the process they neglect those neighborhoods and people that truly would
need support. The creativity fix as the business park of the new century. Second-rate
cities are much more vulnerable to adversarial politics and ideologies that
promote suburbanization instead of development of successful cities. Unlike
cities of global format like New York or Tokyo, they cannot create enough of
an independent urban dynamic that buffers them against anti-urban politics.
Michael J. Thompson traces the long history of an ideology that
feeds much of these politics. Antiurbanism an ideology
that demonizes urban life. For some concrete examples of how these anti-urban
politics can be directly reflected in concrete practices look at Alex
Schafrans Unofficial Guide to 2nd Rate Urbanism.
30-01-07 // MONU #6 - BEAUTIFUL URBANISM

(browse
the entire issue #6 on YouTube)
Potentially
Beautiful by Sean Burkholder; Beyond
Kitsch by Dirk Hebel and Deane Simpson;
Sterile Rotterdam by Melisa Vargas;
The Anti-Urinator by Supersudaca;
Beauty and the Sublime by Joost Meuwissen;
The Revolving Transient by Lukas
Reichel; Pedaling Hope by Jen Petersen;
Microrayons by Bee Flowers;
Advanced
City Camouflage by Cruz Garcia; Stripped Bare by Nathalie
Aguinaldo
The Terrifying Century of Beautiful Urbanism by Bert de Muynck;
The Secrets behind the Making of a Beautiful City: Jakarta by Ilya
Maharika; A short Encounter with a Chair by Katerina Pertselaki;
Beautiful Urbanism by Pierre De Angelis; Great Unraveling
by Ju-Hyun Kim and Bohyun Kim; The City Beautiful by Suzanne
Loen; A Typology of Mess Punkt by Jeremy Beaudry; Big
is Beautiful by Jarrik Ouburg
Even though the concept beauty remains elusive we think
our issue is successful in shining some spotlights on the issue. One of the
themes from the articles is that beauty in urbanism is what one could call an
emergent quality. It rarely is in the object itself. It exists in the way we
perceive spaces and objects, our vantage point. It is while wandering though
the city, resolving contradictions, when we see things that jolt our imaginations
that we experience beauty. It
can be a small detail such as obscure dots on the sidewalk that German civil
engineers place all over the city to measure which propel Jeremy Beaudry
along daydreaming trajectories as he assembles the dotted pattern of Berlin.
Movement plays a central part, be it by bicycle as Jen Petersen
describes or in future cable cars that Lukas Reichelt invents.
Or within 30 years high resolution and real time aerial photography will open
yet another facade of the city to our perception the view of the roofs
as Ju-Hyun Kim and Bohyun Kim predict. But if it is not all just
in our minds then there are some important tools for those who do care about
who and what it is that is built and declared beautiful or left for us
to find the beauty in. How much leverage do we really have to imagine or stamp
that which is beautiful if we must resolve ourselves between a complete
rejection of the sorts of beauty that seems to have many followers Disney
architecture for example to a naïve embracing of 30m high cowboy
boots? Can we go truly Beyond Kitsch as Dirk Hebel and Diane
Simpson suggest? Does the striving for a generic sense of beauty bear
even more serious repercussions as Ilya Maharika argues in his
study of Jakarta?
10-07-06 // MONU #5 - BRUTAL URBANISM

(browse
the entire issue #5 on YouTube)
The Return of the Repressed by Loïc Wacquant; Vandalism
as a Productive Force by Michael Zinganel; The Evil Architects
Do by Eyal Weizman; Preventing Brutal Urbanism -
Interview with the Director of the Security Task Force for the 2006 World Cup
by Bernd Upmeyer; Terrorists Love Density by STAR;
The Future of June 4th by Austin Arensberg; Repulsive
Desperation in the Constructions of Survival by Baruch Bruce Gottlieb;
Happy Slapping &ndash - Urban Violance in the Age of Camera Phones
by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer; 5000
Years of Brutal Urbanism by UAS; It's the Protocol, Stupid
by Marc Schuilenburg; On the Run - Contesting Urban Boundaries
by Lukas Feireiss; Cities of Collision by Philipp
Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets; (re)Moving History by John
Comazzi; As a Child of the Suburbs: - a response to How Suburbs
Destroy Democracy by Alex Schafran; A Rejoinder to Alex
Schafran by Michael J. Thompson
Roughness, violence, brutality, seediness, ghettoization all these
are words that we associate much more readily with the city than with a suburb
or the bucolic countryside. It seems even drug related crime develops a different
character depending on whether it is in the city or the suburb. As the NYTimes
reported in early July, identity theft is the crime of choice for meth addicts
and both are flourishing in suburban regions of the US. In contrast crack cocaine
or heroin dealers, are supported by heavily armed gangs usually set up in higher
density urban zones. These high density areas are suited to urban
crimes like, prostitution, carjacking and robbery. So the suburban habitat seems
perfectly suited for the sleepless meth-addict roaming through the internet,
garbage cans and outdoor mailboxes in a quest to gather identities, while the
density and proximity of a city is more fertile soil for the impulsiveness and
raw brutally that is typical for crack and cocaine criminality. In a similar
direction one of the directors of the World Cup 2006 security
in our interview echoed some thoughts that also show the relationships between
spatial configuration and the art of preventing urban brutality. These are just
some of the topics that this issue of Monu presents: Media representation and
context of brutality is one key aspect as our contributors show. Be it the possibility
to easily record and distribute via cell-phone cameras as Peter Moertenboek
and Helge Mooshammer describe in their article. Or the impossibility
to censor images of resistance as Austin Arensberg describes.
In our leading article Loic Wacquant analyzes the intensifying
of structural brutality in the city: economic, social and political exclusion
and the backlashes that inevitably follow. But brutality can also be an almost
integral part of the history of development, in some cities as articles about
places as different as Jerusalem and Seoul by Tim Rieniets
and Baruch Gottlieb respectively show.
16-01-06 // MONU #4 - DENIED URBANISM

(browse
the entire issue #4 on YouTube)
Scrap and Build by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Jorge Almazán;
Ex Gas Stations by UAS; Shopping for Vice
by Jeffrey Ludlow; The Future of Filming in Downtown Los Angeles
by Sarah Lorenzen; A Guide to Visiting Cities by Boris Sieverts;
The Master of Lockhart (Texas) by Hans Frei; Transforming Local
Government - privately by Robert H. Nelson; How Suburbs Destroy
Democracy by Michael J. Thompson; Literature of the City 101
by William Alatriste; No Simple Problem Interview by Martin
Schwegmann und Thorbjörn Reuter Christiansen with Mika Hannula; Infrascapes,
Urban Androgyny and other unplanned Effects of Metropolitan Dynamics by
Gabriel Duarte; No Slush by Tommi Mäkynen; E 70 by
Beatriz Ramo/ STAR; Reinventing Lifta by Malkit Shoshan
and Eitan Bronstein; Welcome to Houston, Texas by Eric Leshinsky;
The Heckpfad by Kai Dolata and Lola Meyer; Volkspalast by
Amelie Deuflhard and Sophie Krempl-Klieeisen; Hidden Veneration by
Kristina Blazevski; DIY by Matthijs Bouw
From
Tokyo to Lockhart Texas, from suburbs and informal
settlements to the biggest representational buildings in capital cities, from
Helsinki to Jerusalem, this issue offers a dazzling
journey around the world to forms and episodes of urban life that have one thing
in common: they lead a precarious existence, in our perceptions and in recognition
of what is viable urban life or - more drastically - are actually
threatened in their existence. It is not only le Corbusiers famous the
eyes that cannot see or dont want to see, but sometimes also that
which the eyes do not want to see (any longer). However as many of the contributions
in this issue show clearly most of the time both of those symptoms of denying
urbanism are happening simultaneously and are faces of the same coin. And
the blindness and ignorance seems to be global and escapes narrow definitions
of political ideology and even the categories of benevolent planners. Preservation
of buildings and the neglect of destruction does not necessarily protect urban
life quite the opposite as Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Jorge Almazán
suggest in their article about Tokyo. More dramatically, historic
preservation or reconstruction can also be a strategy to rewrite the history
of a place, as if to erase the traces of another population as is happening
in Lifta - Israel. Size does not matter for the concept of denied
urbanism at least looking at the contributions. A small informal settlement
on the fringes of the inner city of Cologne can be subject to
the same mix of willful ignorance and the desire to create a clean city just
as the Palast der Republik in Berlin the
biggest representational building of the former GDR. More often than not there
are many sides from which one can see the denial. On the one hand Suburbia
the denying of urban life has profound negative consequences for democracy as
Michael Thompson argues. On the other hand Michael Nelson
sees potential in home owner associations as a particular form of governance
that is massively emerging in suburban contexts and that is widely ignored at
least among the mainstream planning community.
05-07-05
// MONU #3 - POLITICAL URBANISM
(browse
the entire issue #3 on YouTube)
Planning
and Activism by Malkit Shoshan; nEUtral by bad-architects;
Rojak by Maggie Peng; Between Aerial Defense and Modernism
by Lola Meyer; Model City - Interview with Margitta Faßl,
the managing director of 'Wohnungsgesellschaft Hoyerswerda' by Bernd
Upmeyer; You shall be Urban by Theo Deutinger; Flevoland:
From State Planning to Planning the Stateless by CASE; The Pharmacy
by Joost Meuwissen; Turning the Corner by Fabian Faltin;
Supersuburbia by UAS
Exploring
the relationship between power, politics and cities, urban territories is like
looking at the chicken and egg question. What grows out of what? In Hoyerswerda,
a middle sized east-German city where we spoke to Margitta Fassl,
the Managing Director of the largest housing authority (that manages about 60x%
of the cities housing units), the situation seems clear. The city over the last
50 years has been a ball on the waves of larger economic and political developments.
From a small town of about 7,000 people, Hoyerswerda was built up into a model
city the socialist era with about 70,000 people, now to its status is being
a model amongst the shrinking cities in Eastern Germany that wither
in the new market economics. Like clockwork is house after house demolished.
There remain approximately 40,000 residents and the city is expected to lose
at least another 10,0000 in the coming years. Hoyerswerda came to tragic fame
in the early 90's when a racist, xenophobic mob and dozens of neo-nazis repeatedly
attacked immigrants and engaged in violent street fights with the police. Ultimately
the discussion about the relation between urban form and urban development,
to politics and power, has a large impact on the self-understanding of the professions
that deal with these topics. Are we as architects, planners, social scientists
etc. mere 'hostages', as Rem Koolhaas expressed it at one point,
of larger economic and political contexts, or can planning, research and building
actually be activism, a contribution to a struggle to change things? Malkit
Shoshan in her truly extraordinary project in a village in Israel
in a way answers this question. Her account of the project in "Planning
and Activism" shows how research in urban planning combined with
an effort to engage stakeholders and powerbrokers can actually be a powerful
political act.
20-01-05
// MONU #2 - MIDDLE CLASS URBANISM

(browse
the entire issue #2 on YouTube)
Dispersion
by Johannes Fiedler; Density, Zoning, and Class in New York City
by Beth Lieberman; Mc Mansions by William Alatriste; Urbanism
for the Middle Class in historic City Centers by Fernando Vegas and Camilla
Mileto; Middle Class Urbanism Interview - with Thomas Sieverts
by Bernd Upmeyer ; IKEA: When Cathedrals were blue by Manuel
Shvartzberg; Neu Karow: a new space between berlin's past and
its border by Katherine Bourke and Gregor Harbusch; Landscape
Urbanism by Detlev Ipsen and Holger Weichler; Circuitous
by Leah Beeferman; Adi, Audi, Aldi by Theo Deutinger;
Middle Class Emulations by Angie Waller; The New Middle
Class by Robert Winkel; Middle Class Desires by
UAS
For the last few decades the middle class has been the driving force behind
urban innovation. More than any other, this urban group has both the financial
resources and the sheer power of numbers to effectively transform desire into
urban reality. Many of the most obvious components of our cities - Row houses,
apartment buildings and sports facilities, to name but a few - are in large
measure a function of the existence of a broad middle class. The middle class
symbolizes modest urban values, values that seem hopelessly anti-utopian and
run counter to the megalomaniac concepts of cities proposed by great architects
like LeCorbusier or Hilbersheimer. But in reality the middle class
is comprised of some of the boldest urban utopists ever, individuals who have
been realizing their utopias for decades. Much less dogmatic and more successful
than any imagined utopia, with their power, influence and sheer numbers the
middle class has shaped the urban landscapes we inhabit today. And although
the term middle class is very blurry it might be exactly the contradictory relation
of middle class to cities that could lead to a definition of what is the middle-class.
As Johannes Fiedler argues in his text "Dispersion",
in the absence of scarcity of some sort (e.g. economic, security) or top-down
regulations, the default choice for living seem to be dispersed, low density
environments. Or as Thomas Sieverts in our interview put it:
"people seek the fringes". It is almost a pioneer-like quality
that parts of the middle class exhibit the constant search for the new
fringe, the new land. The relatively new phenomenon of exurbs is the US expression
of that impulse. Places that are ever further removed from the population centers
almost completely disconnected from any form of civic life. In Europe or Germany
this strategy is not an option due to lack of available open space. Instead
in Berlin, as documented in the article by Katherine Bourke
and Gregor Harbusch, spaces in between old and new cities are the new
frontier the new fringe that the middle-class colonizes.
16-06-04 // MONU #1 - PAID URBANISM
(browse
the entire issue #1 on YouTube)
Imagining the Subsidized Landscape by CUP; After Growth
by CASE with Reinier de Graaf; Urban Distortion by
Shireen A. Barday and Damon W. Root; Urban Money Beats Global Money
by Hans-Henning von Winning; The Paid Urbanism Project by
Thomas Soehl and Bernd Upmeyer; SpaMania by Kai Jonas; Is
a Bathtub Still a Bathtub on Mars? by William Alatriste; Richard
J. Daley’s Chicago Civic Center and the Modernist Urban Landscape
by Emily Pugh
Our experience of urban life today exists as it does because
we have a complex system of subsidies interacting with our urban geography.
Taxes, once extracted from the market economy cycle back to the masses as paid
urbanism. Used wisely or not, spread fairly or unfairly, this money is probably
one of the strongest forces animating our urban conditions today. The places
we live in today are in many ways shaped by government spending - Subsidized
Landscapes. Since the 90s, big enthusiasm about total privatization has
subsided. Nowadays, everybody realizes that there is a need to keep certain
things in the hand of public administration. Redistribution of enormous revenue
is a commonly accepted means of keeping civil democratic societies working.
Government intervention, taxing and spending are the terms we use to describe
this state. Caught in an enormous network of redistribution that pervades everything
and everybody, the power and influence of these processes rarely makes itself
visible; we are never fully aware. A Kafkaesque web of bureaucracies
constantly recreates and resuscitates our urban landscapes. Drifting through
cities with their thousands of invisible dependencies and relationships, no
one person can exactly define what keeps everything alive. Everything
seems to be vibrant, but somewhere down the line, there are crosscutting streams
and flows of decisions and administration behind it. It has been paid for. The
multitudinous products of paid urbanism are hard to identify or define, but
lie hidden behind every stone of the city. The effects of paid urbanism on urban
settings cannot be overemphasized - without paid urbanism, cities as we know
them would not exist. This first issue shines a number of spotlights into the
thicket of subsidies and paid urbanism. What do networks of subsidies look like
in fields like housing and farming in the US and what are their consequences
for cities? What are the aesthetic impacts and absurdities of paid urbanism
in places as different as Chicago, Coney Island (NYC) and Thuringen (eastern
Germany). We feature projects that rethink the networks of paid urbanism
and essays that reflect on the interwoven history of subventions and urbanism.